Porting/Writing WPF application which launches external applications to Silverlight 4 out of browser

Question

WPF launches certain method which calls external exe and waits , and then accesses a file which was an output of external exe. Assuming I would build this application with a consideration of porting to Silverlight 4 later what should I do ?

Answer 1

In order to do this you would need to go through Silverlight's COM automation. I'm sure there's some out-of-process COM server that you could use to start a process. But at that point you've already

• limited your application to Windows
• require full trust
• will only work in "out of browser" mode

At that point, you really gotta ask whether or not it makes any sense to port to Silverlight. WPF is particularly suitable for the above scenarios. You can use ClickOnce to achieve a similar (actually, superior) client update experience and you won't have to jump through hoops to do something as simple as spawning an external process.